Prescott and Sally watched as two of his SOCOs attempted to move the charred body from the sofa into the body bag waiting on the ground, ready to be lifted onto the undertaker’s trolley, which was parked just outside the front door. The undertaker, employed by Thames Valley Police to transport bodies to the mortuary for postmortem, was playing Candy Crush at full blast on his mobile.

“Turn that down!” shouted Prescott. “If I hear another stupid fucking noise from outside, there’ll be two dead bodies being driven to the mortuary, not one. Idiot . . .” he muttered. He turned to Sally. “What do you think of ‘Sheila’?” he asked through his white paper mask. Sally frowned. “We got to call him something till we find out who he is.”

“I get that. But why ‘Sheila’?”

Prescott suddenly realized that the twenty years between them meant his joke was about to fall flat. He plowed on regardless.

“Sheila Ferguson? The Three Degrees? I know he’s got six-degree burns, but there isn’t a group called the Six Degrees.” Sally was still looking very confused. “I pity you,” Prescott mumbled. “You’re too young to appreciate how bloody funny I am.”

The melted underside of the charred body was tangled in with the sofa springs and each time the SOCOs wriggled an arm free, a leg would get caught, and vice versa. In the end, one of Sally’s firefighters decided to cut the springs so that any pieces of metal embedded in the melted skin could just stay there until the body reached the postmortem table, where the pathologist could remove them in their own time. Getting the body off the sofa was like peeling a label off a jar—no matter how carefully you tried to keep the paper in one piece, it would inevitably tear, and you’d then have to decide whether to push the pieces back together and try again, or just leave some bits behind. Finally, the firefighter lying on his back beneath the sofa with wire cutters said, “That’s the last spring gone, you’re good to lift.”

The undertakers lifted the charred body and placed it in the body bag.

As the fluids and dirty fire hose water from the blackened corpse slowly seeped out, it was abundantly clear that something was missing. In the springs of the sofa, the rubber sole of the left shoe had melted like glue and its hold on the foot inside had proved much harder to break than the ankle joint above it. Prescott shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

“Valiant effort, lads.”

Sally stared down through the shell of the sofa at her despondent firefighter on the floor.

“If you could bag the left foot, please, he’d be very grateful.”

Forensic pathologist Abigail Coleman laughed so loud that it disturbed her assistants in the next room.

“Ha! ‘Sheila’! Martin, you are funny!”

Once the laughter had died away, she got down to business. Sheila lay on the postmortem table in the fetal position.